LITTLE ROCK (AP) — The Arkansas Lottery posted a $97.6 million profit Wednesday that will go to college scholarships, a figure that’s $3.4 million more than a year ago and boosted by a one-time $2 million from the company that prints its instant tickets.

Even after the $2 million from Scientific Games Inc., profits were up by $1.4 million, or 1.4 percent, for the 2012 fiscal year that ended June 30. The lottery had sales of $474 million for the fiscal year, thus its profit margin was 20.1 percent.

It was a difficult year for the lottery. Its original director, Ernie Passailaigue, resigned in September after weathering attacks over a critical state audit and his $324,000 salary. His two top deputies left soon afterward, with one resigning and one being fired.

In February, the Arkansas Lottery Commission hired its legal counsel, Bishop Woosley, to lead the agency — at a salary almost one-third of Passailaigue’s. Woosley has worked to build sales through promoting draw games, such as Powerball and Mega Millions, which have a higher profit margin than scratch-ticket games but are less popular among Arkansas lottery players.

Lottery Commission Chairman Ben Pickard credited Woosley with getting the agency through the last months of a “bumpy” year, one in which the lottery’s internal auditor also resigned.

“I think the leadership that Bishop has shown has been very impressive to me,” Pickard said.

Pickard said he agrees with Woosley’s ambition to introduce more lottery players to the numbers games.

“We need to try some new things,” Pickard said. “I would like to see us over a period of time trying to increase the net-to-gross (ratio).”

Pickard has said in the past that he’d like a profit margin of 25 percent. Woosley said he sees an opportunity to increase the proportion of gamblers’ money that goes to scholarships.

“I think we can do it with (draw games) sales, especially given the differentiation in the amount in our instant sales and our (draw games) sales,” Woosley said.

More than 80 percent of the lottery’s sales are in scratch tickets. The proportion of people playing draw games increased slightly in the 2012 fiscal year, adding about $10 million in sales from the year before.

Woosley said it doesn’t make sense to jack up the profit margins in the instant ticket games.

“I think the traditional line of thinking in the industry is that players can sense or know that, and your sales can fall,” he said.

The commission has approved, at Woosley’s request, using money in the lottery’s promotional budget to try to attract players to draw games this fiscal year. Powerball tickets rose in price from $1 to $2 in January, and the game was restructured to build jackpots faster and pay a greater number of smaller prizes. Mega Millions, which has offered eight-figure jackpots this year, still has $1 tickets.

The state is also planning to introduce an Arkansas-only draw game, which will stand in addition to Decades of Dollars, which Arkansas takes part in with a handful of other states.

For the year, players spent $392.3 million, or 82.8 percent on scratch tickets and $81.7 million, or 17.2 percent, on draw tickets. In fiscal 2011, 15.9 percent of sales were spent on numbers games.

The state launched the lottery in September 2009. So far, it has raised a total of $275 million for college scholarships. Last month, the lottery completed a renegotiation of its contract with Atlanta-based Scientific Games. The company lowered some of its rates and made the $2 million payment as a goodwill gesture.